MPs’ Expenses: What Next?

June 22, 2009

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The Daily Telegraph’s bumper MPs’ expenses special supplement made for fulsome weekend reading, with an excellent cover image to boot (hewn from the Guardian).

For those curious about the machinations underlying the Telegraph’s scoop, the Independent has more here. As is now well known, three newspapers turned down the story before Robert Winnett, the Telegraph’s deputy political editor, saw its potential and paid a six figure sum to John Wick, the former SAS man who was hawking a disk containing the full monty of expenses’ information around Fleet Street.

Subsequently, in its dubious wisdom the government redacted detail of sundry receipts in its so-called ‘disclosure’ of information about MPs’ expenses. The Guardian has now taken up the baton, with what it calls “an experiment in crowdsourcing“. In other words, the Guardian has enlisted the help of an eager public in unravelling what lurks beneath the claims.

The Guardian’s move is notable for its feel of Web 2.0 zeitgeist, but at least one media sage is not convinced. Blade bumped into the man behind a highly popular televised politcal satire at a party on the weekend, a formidable character whose privacy Blade is not willing to infringe. But even in his anonymous guise, what he had to say was intriguing: “The whole saga of the MPs’ expenses is extraordinary. But what next? Now that we’ve revealed each and every politician to be venal and corrupt, what are we going to do?”

 

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When a lawyer’s son is before the law

September 8, 2010

A lawyer of Swordplay’s acquaintance finds himself in a fix.

“My teenage son is to be interviewed by the local constable,” he tells us. “He is alleged to have committed an offence.”

We gasp, for such seems the appropriate response, and then ask: is it serious?

“No, it is not,” our troubled legal friend tells us. “In the great scheme of things, my son’s alleged transgression is about as de minimis as they get.”

For a split second, we wonder if said teenage son is cognisant of lawyerly terms of art such as de minimis, but rapidly conclude that the answer to this question is not a sine qua non of further discourse. And so we press on. That sounds good, we say, relatively speaking, at least.

“Yes,” says the lawyer, “but I am at a loss as to what to do with him. Do I come down hard and ground him, or do I play the liberal card, or do I find a compromise?”

That depends, we aver.

“On what?” asks our man.

On whether you would prefer to deal with your son’s alleged offence as a lawyer, or as a father, or as a father who is a lawyer, or maybe even as a lawyer who is a father.

“I see your point,” says the lawyer. And then, as if to prove that there is no cure for recidivism, he says: “The offence is, after all, de minimis.”

Without prejudice, we add.

Pictured: something out of Kafka. Now there was a man who knew about the law. And had a tough old father, too.

Max Mosley and Wayne Rooney: bedfellows?

September 6, 2010

We rarely enjoy pondering Max Mosley – the man, the sins, the legal action, what he stands for – but confess to a degree of grudging admiration for his tenacity in trying to change the law of privacy. As this story from the Independent has it, Mosley has lodged a request with the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg asking that, by law, journalists must inform the subject of a story of the private details they intend to print, prior to publication.

We suspect the motor racing man would never have thought it, but he would appear to have an unlikely bedfellow in a certain England footballer. Step forward, Wayne Rooney, who would presumably put his name to Mosley’s petition.

Pictured courtesy of NashvilleScene: some bedfellows are stranger than fiction.


Memo to Freelance Writers: return that editor’s call quickly

September 3, 2010

Woe betide those who freelance and fail to return a call.

We say this upon hearing of a normally prolific freelance journalist who picked up a voicemail from an editor at one of the nationals on Tuesday afternoon. Please call us, was the message, and it could mean just one thing – a commission.

Our hero’s habitual practice is to return such calls as soon as is reasonably practicable, as m’learned friends might put it. In practice, that would habitually mean within a couple of hours. Most atypically, and for reasons we have yet to fathom, our man failed to call back for a full 24 hours.

By then, said editor had looked elsewhere. One of our man’s competitors had the gig, an interesting piece about cricket and the law, one which might just be in The Times today and which, we assume, asks whether the Pakistan cricket team have been caught out (in the legal sense, you understand).

We make no judgement on the no ball scandal, save to say that it is a scandal, but in another sense the moral is clear: in the fast-paced world of modern media, he who hesitates is lost.

Pictured courtesy of PrintedClothing.com: a fast-selling shirt.